NYT: In Iraq War, Death Also Comes to Soldiers in Autumn of Life

[kskiska]

Master Sgt. Thomas R. Thigpen was 52 when he fell dead of a heart attack during a touch-football game in Kuwait on March 16 — a casualty that does not quite fit the standard template of wartime tragedy: the fresh-faced 18-year-old cut down with the promise of a full life ahead.

He was not the oldest to die since the invasion of Iraq. That would be Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney, 59, who operated the machine gun in the door of his unit's Black Hawk helicopters — the same job he performed in Vietnam — and died after surgery for an intestinal problem. Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten Jr., 55, serving in Kuwait in the same unit as his 21-year-old son, died of heat stroke while driving a Humvee without air-conditioning across the scorching Iraqi desert.

In all, 10 soldiers age 50 or older have died in the Iraq war, some of medical ailments that might have excluded them from earlier conflicts, others under fire in the heat of battle. That is a small percentage of the nearly 900 American service members who have died since the Iraq war began, but it is 10 times the percentage of men in that age group who died in Vietnam. It is nearly as many as those of that age who died in the entire Korean War.

And those 10 deaths, if no sadder than those of the young soldiers who never left their teens, have created a far different, and perhaps surprising, landscape of grief. It is a scene not of spring, but of harvest: a total of 11 grandchildren left behind, 21 decades of marriage, years of service to communities, mortgages nearly paid off, and long careers that were already pointed toward retirement.

"I told him, `Daddy, you're too old to be going over there like that,' " said Liza Knighten, 57, who met her husband, whom she called Daddy, 34 years ago near her home in the Philippines while he was in the Navy. "He told me, `I'm not too old to fight for our country.' "

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18OLDER.html?hp